


On the River Styx

by Ratzinger



Series: Needle's Eye of Time [1]
Category: Wiedźmin | The Witcher (Video Game), Wiedźmin | The Witcher - All Media Types, Wiedźmin | The Witcher Series - Andrzej Sapkowski
Genre: Angst, Celtic Mythology & Folklore, Character Study, Dreams and Nightmares, F/M, Gen, Guilt, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Magic, Non-Linear Narrative, Not relationship-centric in an explicit manner, Post-Books, Pre-Games, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-29
Updated: 2020-02-29
Packaged: 2021-02-28 03:15:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,692
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22946911
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ratzinger/pseuds/Ratzinger
Summary: Father – I never called him thus, and yet… it could not have been anyone else.It is worse than any of her nightmares about future peril because the things she has dreamt about tonight have already happened. In Rivia, in a story she once lived. And she knows that nothing and nobody can change what happened in that story. So, an unappeasable longing devours her – longing for something she had always yearned for and imagined to have had possessed in various places and times, though she had never really gotten to experience it with those who had been bound to her by destiny.And what good was a destiny like that?
Relationships: Avallac'h | Crevan Espane aep Caomhan Macha & Cirilla Fiona Elen Riannon, Avallac'h | Crevan Espane aep Caomhan Macha/Cirilla Fiona Elen Riannon
Series: Needle's Eye of Time [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1655209
Comments: 12
Kudos: 29





	On the River Styx

_‘There is no destiny,’ his own voice. ‘There is none. None. It does not exist. The only thing that everyone is destined for is death.’_

_..._

_‘How… How will it happen?’ he finally asked, cold and emotionless._

_‘I’ll take you by the hand,’ she said, looking him directly in the eyes. ‘I’ll take you by the hand and lead you through the meadow. Into the cold, wet fog.’_

_‘And then? What is there, beyond the fog?’_

_‘Nothing,’ she smiled. ‘There is nothing more.’_

\- **A. Sapkowski**  
 _ **Sword of Destiny**_

\---//---

She wakes to the chill of night, feverish with fear.

Mist cradles her soul, hobbling her limbs on the doorstep between this life and the other one. Frozen in the woods of her dreams, she hears a word – a dear and painful word, a word that used to mean something – hammering against the inside of her skull. However much she wishes though, she cannot utter it; a sudden and irresistible forgetfulness washes over her, scattering the beguiling images in a swipe of a careful hand across her mind. The mist swirls beautifully. It shapes itself into wild horses, unicorns, and apple blossoms blowing in the wind that is coming in from the sea. And the forest in which she had stood but a moment ago crumbles and morphs, delicately, like when salt is sprinkled onto freshly painted canvas. The touch coaxes her with a promise of a peaceful, dreamless sleep, and a part of her listens obediently. She must heal, eventually.

Yet, the pain used to mean something. It had had her entire world wrapped up in it, and worlds did not end at the sound of her footsteps – they embraced her. She can feel the unease in her blood: there are things she can never forget, wounds she reopens just to feel cradled by their significance again. Thus, Ciri clings to the remnants of this feeling through fear, which runs potent and hot under her skin, for she does not want to forget. The painterly touch against her mind halts at these thoughts, second-guessing its course for the briefest of moments, and Ciri hears a woman crying out with a voice that is her own, though not.

She jerks upright.

The air is damp and smells of pine resin. She breathes it in, shifting uncomfortably against the shirt that sticks to skin now that she has stopped undressing for sleep entirely; too inconvenient. The smouldering tension in her limbs does not disappear at these ‘comforting’ signs of the mundane, however, since the sight of pale, blue eyes above her is anything but ordinary and comforting. _Wary, frowning._ Ciri realises with some alarm that her skin still tingles with his magic – as if she had just stepped in from the cold.

She does not wait for him to speak or explain but flings herself off her cot and clears out of the low chamber of the barn dwelling. Somewhere on her way out, she hits herself against a broken damper, forgets her boots, and forgets her sword and cloak even – forgets everything but the vestiges of swirling mist inside of which she has lost her dream. Stranded like this, she clings to the other sensations in her body – the gnawing anxiety, the fast evaporating adrenaline, the unexplainable dread – and hardly notices the cold rain hitting her sleep-warm shoulders, or the shadow that follows her outdoors.

 _Someone waits for me in the woods_ , she thinks as she stares into the dark treeline where the wind growls in the treetops, breaking branches, and plays a second fiddle to the pounding of her heart. She had sought someone; or somebody had wanted to find her, perhaps? Remembering hurts. It brings back terrible, disorientating memories of her first flight across time and space. But the people she had wanted to get to then are both gone now; Ciri herself had given them away.

She is alone, and no one is waiting for her.

‘Do you know what it was that I saw?’ she asks over the patter of rain. ‘Can you see what I see in my dreams?’

He does not answer, nor does he have to. Nightmares had always been a staple of her existence. Yet these ones – ones that had started frequenting her after she had believed she could start her life anew – had stopped as suddenly as they had started. When he appeared.

The fine fabric of his clothes remains dry and undamaged even in pouring rain, even after she has hit him square across the chest. She does not look at him, does not care to see the reproach and odium in that inhumanely calm face. She focuses solely on what he deserves, what they all deserve. Ciri knows this emotion intimately; it cleanses and purifies. It grounds her in the face of the unknown. She knows even more than that. For instance, she is aware that her explosive anger comprises so much of what the elf cannot stand in her. And yet, as he stands before her, tall and unflinching like a statue of granite, with eyes that express pity – she should not have looked, why can she not stop looking? – he too is being the epitome of what she detests about him. So she hits him again. _Let him get angry!_ And again, and focuses on the certainty of her rage, which nevertheless does not manage to quell the anxiety that blazes on in her heart.

Deflecting her gracefully and finally catching her hands in his, the sorcerer looks at the witcheress for a long time in the grey hour before dawn. And she knows by his telling silence and extraordinary composure that she is right about him. _He knows about what I see and has known all along._

‘They terrify you,’ he starts calmly, holding her fists together between them. ‘You do not know your way through them, and that is how we found our way to you.’

She jerks away from him at the reminder of her weakness, and though his grip feels like iron at first, he yields quickly to her.

‘But it will not happen again; not as long as I am with you,’ he continues softly. ‘Still, I would rather you did not frighten yourself while we remain on the Spiral and vulnerable.’

‘ _You_ frighten me!’ she hisses through clenched teeth, satisfied when he flinches. ‘I do not remember asking you to do this! Hell, I would not have even known if… I do not want you inside my head!’

He makes no effort to argue with her, observing her silently, expectantly. Looking at the withered shrubs near the wall of the dwelling, she wonders if there should not be snow instead. Snow white and wild crimson. Somehow she simply cannot shake the feeling that she may have lost something important tonight. She shakes her head.

‘If it is as you say and these are visions, then I – I need to know.’ He closes his eyes briefly, mercifully. ‘I have every right! I do not care if it is Eredin, I just – dreams do not have to be true. But they can be…’

‘Zireael -'

‘I know that this one was different!’ she does not let him interrupt her.

There’s a pressure building in her temples.

‘Whatever you did, it did not work. I can still feel it,’ the forest, tall and dark, pulls at her. ‘Don’t tell me I do not know what I’m saying, because I do. And you do. You have to understand me, I only want him to hear me before –’

And just like that, the bone-deep chill of her rain-soaked clothes, the tiredness of her injured body, and the overwhelming guilt and regret rush in and douse the fire of fear that has so far kept her burning. Her shoulders sag a little, muscles relaxing as the shadow passes and the torrent of recognition slips through the dissolving mist with merciless knowledge. The air pricks with petrichor.

Suddenly empty and freezing, she leans against him, and he lets her as the lakes of her eyes glaze over with tears like spring ice.

There is a path in the frozen alder woods, branching and bare, and it leads out into an open meadow – into white, wet fog. It’s the path she had taken to get somewhere. And at the end of this road, branching and bare, stands a lonely figure of a man. Alone. _Afraid? Or is that only me?_ Earth crunches under her boots. She wants to run to him to reassure him, to reassure herself. But her linen dress tears under the jealous grasp of rose hips and the white and frozen ground underneath the bushes turns crimson with squashed fruit.

When she glances up again, she sees a fair haired woman, barefoot and in a pale linen dress, reaching out her hand to the man and waiting. Waiting at the edge of a black forest which has no end to lead the man through the meadow, through the fog that is wet and white. It smells of the sea around them; she does not smell it, she just knows. And as he is earnestly considering the pale hand offered to him, dread grips Ciri’s heart and she calls out, ignoring the frost that nips at her bare heels. She has become wholly what she sees. Thus, in that very instant, Ciri has become the fear before the eternity, before the nothing that lies beyond the fog. And the man that is so dear to her heart does not hear her. But the woman turns her head; her eyes are pale and blue.

_You can save him, Child of the Elder Blood. Before he plunges into the nothingness which he has come to love. Into the black forest which has no end._

_Father! Do not go, father! Don’t leave me…_

But he does not hear her. He does not come for her. He is leaving her in the mist where the crooked soul of the alder forest will eat into her spirit – forever. And all of a sudden Ciri becomes unsure as to who it is that she sees in the enchanted mist, at the end of the road that she chose. So she turns around, a garland of daisies falling from her brow, and runs.

‘I took them both,’ she mutters absentmindedly. ‘I took them both so they would never be apart, never alone again. I wanted them to remain together even if I could not go with them, because no one – no one should be alone when –’

Her voice breaks in an ugly, painful manner that she has no will left to subdue. While the rain is letting up over the small, abandoned dwelling at the end of an overgrown path that winds through the woods, bitter tears continue to water her face.

And how they can choke her. ‘I bring death.’

She senses him denying it over the light buzzing in her ears, but for a long while all else around Ciri falls away. The pain is too acute and makes her limbs freeze as her heart trembles in the whirling pool of guilt and regret. _Father – I never called him thus, and yet it could not have been anyone else._ It is worse than any of her nightmares about future peril because the things she has dreamt about tonight have already happened. In Rivia, in a story she once lived. And she knows that nothing and nobody can change what happened in that story. So, an unappeasable longing devours her – longing for something she had always yearned for and imagined to have had possessed in various places and times, though she had never really gotten to experience it with those who had been bound to her by destiny. And what good was a destiny like that?

‘We awake from the dreams we have been dreaming for too long, screaming, because we mistake the hope in them for our just and fair due.’

She hears the elf’s deep voice against her ear and his closeness startles her. It makes her absurdly self-conscious in the middle of grief, yet it comes as a welcome distraction too. How unallowably pathetic she must look, she thinks as she hesitantly tries to put some distance between them again. Her skin tingles with the same warmth as before – as if she had just stepped in from the cold.

He does not appear bothered, but his eyes, pale and blue and ordinarily so indecipherable, seem sad to her now that he looks at her. ‘Destiny rarely concerns itself with fairness, O Swallow.’

Ciri does not know how to respond to that. So she does not.

\---//---

He is sitting on the shore of a lake.

Under weeping willows and wispy alders he weaves his spell and waits. In the middle of the lake, clear and mirror-like, lies a small, green island. For a keen-eyed observer, serene light would always reflect off the apple trees in full bloom there regardless of the weather and the translucent mist that hangs forever over the lake’s crystalline waters. Once you crossed the lake water the fruit would already be ripe for picking. It was truly a singular place in many times, which did not mean it was not many different places in a single time. And as it turns out, this one was exactly the one the sorcerer needed today.

The trick was not in getting across, because that was only natural. Rather it was in finding a reason to depart again, for that was thoroughly against nature to everyone who had found their way onto the island of apple trees. Avallac'h knew it only too well. He did not mind that the island was being associated with him. Stories were always a little bit more fantastic than reality, and that was very good indeed, because reality was stranger than fiction and not easy or satisfying to recall and talk about. After all, one’s actual person mattered very little in the grand fabric of myth and meaning.

Immutable and untouchable, this shrouded haven was a plane of healing and waiting, and many stayed in the gardens for a long time. Others passed on despite the sweet smells of the orchard, however, once they had decided to venture forth, they would never again meet with those they had once known in life. Thus, on the steps of the gate that had stood open since time immemorial, many continued to exist in dream-like days that were regularly dreamt by all life. Prosaically enough, this limbo too was but another time and another place. The Sage had come to know it for what it was, though it had taken a part of him in exchange for the knowledge. At the end of the day Crevan knew the way, for he knew truly many astonishing things, even for an elf, but at the twilight of his own days, no one would wait for him on the island of apple trees, on the Malus Island, Ynys Afallach.

_I left you._

_I did not do what I should have done back then, and now everything hangs by a thread. I should have taken you with me. By force I should have taken you back home, dragged you behind me, kicking and screaming, if necessary. I should have killed that dh’oine with my bare hands, and I will never forgive myself for not having managed to. And had you hated me for the rest of eternity, Lara, it would have mattered very little. For you would have lived. In time, you would have forgotten your hatred of me, just as you would have forgotten him. Life, after all, contains many a maddening multitude, and nothing and no one could ever hold your affection and attention for long. But I did not do everything in my power to bring you back home again._

_I left you to your fate._

For a moment the elf's voice trembles as he chants under his breath and rolls a little green stone in various configurations in-between his long fingers. He knows though that when his eyes catch the likeness of his beloved in the enchanted mist, and when he senses the presence of death, then it is truly naught but his own tired imagination and not the daughter of Shiadhal. Because Lara left the shores under the apple trees long ago; happily or unhappily, Crevan does not know. She had, ultimately, always done as she had wished.

_And I? What did I do?_

He finishes the spell, letting the stone fall on the palm of his hand and studies it. Its jade-coloured surface curls around itself in the shape of a tree-leaf trefoil knot. A bond of destiny was a simple and elegant thing: a dream that had to be dreamed. He dreamt of destiny often, and accurately. Why, they say he never makes mistakes. Well, stories are always a little bit more fantastic than reality. And his reality, for the longest time now, has been strange enough to make him want to scream.

The thought that "something more" could have called to Lara, that something could have been more important than her people, than the good of all... than him. And that this unfathomable "something" could have been correct in taking her away from him – this notion does not fit inside his head. It never will. By which the Sage means that he can comprehend it, naturally, but he cannot submit to it - not unconditionally and not in his heart. To have that arrogant, foolish, beautiful, green-eyed monster repeat the insult then, as if in her own uncompromising desperation to get back to the witcher and the sorceress - to her friends fated to die – could have been hidden the deep wisdom of the ages.

It is growing cold under the weeping willows and alders by the lake which is now filling with fog, thick and white as milk.

‘Did you bring the creature?’

‘No,’ the Sparrowhawk replies. ‘It slipped away from us in the Alnitak system.’

‘That’s a pity.’

He would have been very interested in what the young unicorn could have shown them about the Swallow.

‘Agreed. Correct me if I am wrong but that should not change anything for you, should it now?’

‘Not at all.’

They measure each other, the Warlord and the Knowing One. For the moment, everything between them remains as it has been for centuries: balanced and by the book, with each enabling the other to the best of their ability in an alliance and friendship that sets the interests of their people above everything else. Both can claim to know the other’s modus operandi appropriately well, yet neither can deny that the scale underneath them has conclusively shattered with Muircetach’s passing. It is as if both have awoken from quiescence in their own right, though neither thinks the other quite realises the depth of it. Thus, for the moment, everything remains as it has been for centuries. For the moment.

‘I must admit, the thought of this expedition makes me uneasy. If only because I do not condone disturbing the dead.’

Avallac’h gives a wry smile, glancing at the extravagant outfit of the Dearg Ruadhri.

‘Yet there is nothing,’ the King of the Hunt continues, unperturbed, ‘that I would not do for this unfortunate girl, Dana forgive me. For it is clear to one and all that time for decisive action is well overdue.’ Even now, Eredin wears an understated onyx circlet set with rubies on his brow and his eyes, sharp and attentive, lack all hesitancy. A huntsman who for a long time now has fancied himself a ruler.

_And will get his wish._

‘She will come,’ the Sage says with indifference, stepping down to the lake. ‘Everything has been foreseen.’

‘Of course it has.’

‘You’ll see,’ he brushes off the other's disbelief easily for he is feeling delightfully expectant all of a sudden; lighter and nimbler than he has felt in a while. ‘You will have no trouble recognising or finding the _vatt’ghern_ ; this is the correct time and place. One that belongs to the ones on the island. Follow the light, as I explained to you. Oh and if you can, do not eat from the apple trees.’

Sparrowhawk raises an eyebrow. ‘Why would I eat from the apple trees?’

‘Because the forbidden fruit is sweet and you deny yourself very little?’ the blonde shrugs and takes the jade trefoil knot in hand, letting the primal force that permeates the waters separating the planes of the living and the dead tie itself together with the spell he has wrought. ‘Now watch, if you please.’

Without further ado he throws the stone flatly across the crystal clear waters, right into the milk white fog. In an instant, the faint sunlight that for keen eyes always reflects off the blooming apple trees scatters into tiny threads in a flash of dark light and then reformulates into an intricate webbing that encompasses everything, the elves included - tying them together. No sound ever arises out of the fog, merely a faint light begins to shine in the distance where the little stone has disappeared to.

Crevan had, once, mistaken destiny for a dream – something to be followed, rather than lived.

A long time ago, that, and subject to becoming remedied.

Now and always, the magician thinks of timeless, emerald eyes in which one can trace the threads that hold together galaxies, and muses: _very well, my dear; we will do it all your way and see._ Under the weeping willows and wispy alders, the Knowing One steps onto the surface of the lake in the middle of which lies a small green island, and walks on the waters of Avalon. The Hunt overtakes the Fox in their billowing crimson capes in a few moments, on the bridge that he has wrought through the mists of time.

In another time and place, an ashen-haired woman stirs with a concerning sense of foreboding, fending off a night terror. And eerie lights flicker faintly over the azure lake she can see from the window of her chambers in Camelot.

**Author's Note:**

> The premise is that Ciri leaves the Arthurian mythos before the game timeline starts due to visions/nightmares of various kinds, one of which concerns Geralt and Yennefer being menaced by the Wild Hunt on the isle of apple trees (i.e. afterlife/entryway to the Otherworld). Also, in Celtic mythology, fairies or elves are intimately connected with the notion of the Otherworld, or life beyond death, and are often depicted as rulers of said Otherworld; it is no co-incidence, for example, that Ynys Afallach is an actual variation of the name for Avalon (and gives a name to one of our main space elves). 
> 
> Equally, Ciri acts very much like the ferryman Charon when taking Yen and Geralt to the isle of apple trees, which ties into her associating herself with death at various points throughout the series. That is where the scene of Ciri seeing Death in the same manner as Geralt saw Death on Sodden hill originates from (and ofc the title of the piece is also inspired by it). 
> 
> In other words, I took the mix of myths that Sapkowski had already utilised and developed them further, ending up with two connected character studies, where the common thread is that these two characters, whose fates are intertwined in one way or another, neither got what they wanted out of what they thought was their destiny (for Ciri - a life with her chosen family; for Avallac'h - love of Lara). And both of them harbour a complicated sense of guilt and bitterness over it. Take, for instance, Ciri's line over dying Geralt in LOTL: 'It’s as though I’ve killed him.’ Whereas Avallac'h's personal feelings are just a profound mess. Nevertheless, I think it could become a shared point of mutual understanding between them.
> 
> Oh, and some dream manipulation shenanigans are involved too, since in Sapkowski's universe dreams are such.
> 
> (if you are really-really interested, A Gift for the Princess from Netflix's OST was playing in the background for the most of this)


End file.
